Windows 10 and Me
#Windows10 fail
I have an HP Pavilion D7 laptop. Microsoft advertised to me for a few months (it seems) that my laptop was capable of upgrading to Windows 10.
So on July 29, 2015, when I was prompted, I said “Yes!” to the upgrade.
Downloading took a few hours. It’s about a 2Gb install. Over wireless, it took a while.
Installing it took quite a few hours. I think it was essentially overnight.
When it was done, it rebooted – and I was in Windows 10! Most programs worked.
But…
My second monitor no longer worked. No second monitor worked. I tried different monitors, different cables.
Nothing.
I called tech support on my monitor (Samsung).
Samsung tech support, while free (yay Samsung!) was really useless. They had no idea of what I was talking about. No understanding of Windows 10.
They had me debug the monitor and cable again, and then helpfully suggested it was an incompatibility.
They told me to download the latest driver and install it.
When I did that, and rebooted – no video monitor at all. Not on my second monitor, not on my laptop monitor.
Samsung said that they weren’t aware of the issue. And that was that.
HP could not help me because I could not download their software to debug the problem because – and this is key – they didn’t understand that without any ability to see what was on any of the monitors (internal or external), there really wasn’t any solution available from them other than “That thing you did? Don’t do that thing.”
My laptop would not boot into any of the safe modes offered by the Windows 10 Recovery screen – always a blank screen.
I will say this – the HP laptop recovery did have an option to pave my laptop and put back the original Windows 7 installation, losing all my existing programs.
I did that, and now I have a functional laptop – after another five hours of Windows 7 Updates to install.
Some programs no longer work.
Windows Live Writer, for example, won’t install. It used to work on this laptop. Now it won’t install, and when I click the link for help on the problem, the link takes me to Outlook.com to my mailbox. Which is singularly unhelpful. My problem isn’t that I want to read my email. My problem is that I downloaded a program from Microsoft for Windows 7 that does not install on a Windows 7 laptop that it used to work on just fine the day before. The only thing that’s changed is that the laptop is now a fresh copy of Windows 7 + 196 (Yep, 196!) Windows updates installed.
